A Phone

Greetings,

His first two weeks in Anatolia involved settling in; the flat, city and teaching orientation.

“A” helped him buy a DNA cell phone. “G” said it was essential. He’d never had one. It was a red Nokia E65 gadget with all kinds of buttons and functions; like calendars, tools, SMS, IM, Teams, Bluetooth, internet access, GPS and To Do, Did, and Does. Connections.

This “Instant, Everywhere You Are, Or Imagine You Are or Need To Be,” dimensional proportion suited his status acquiring mobility extreme.

One morning he and "A" took a taxi to an nursery area below a castle. They found white, red and purple roses, cactus, ten small plants, containers, and potting soil.

For teaching he bought three pairs of lightweight linen pants in brown, beige and black; five long sleeved button-downed cotton shirts in various motifs, two ties - one turquoise and one dark blue - and three pairs of very, very thin black socks. He bought an iron and ironing board for the linen and cotton fabric because he loves ironing words.

Then he knotted a tie to his red phone and dragged it through Ankara yelling, “Look! See! I’m connected to the Universe! I am now a VIP! I have Infinite Diversity Through Infinite Combinations.”

Everyone looked up from the ground with serious expressions after studying pavement (cracked and broken in places like China which gave him a sense of remembering) or their minute delicate phones cradled like infants in sleep mode and congratulated him with lilies, orchids, assorted floral arrangements and so forth.

New friends took him to a seafood restaurant. Seafood is plentiful and delicious in Ankara. Waiters in clean shirts with black ties guided them to an outdoor table covered with a white tablecloth, multiple sets of silver cutlery, water glasses and folded napkins.

A waiter brought them mineral water in a glass goblet with a thin stem. A slice of lemon floated on bubbles. He also deposited a bowl filled with green, red, and black olives lightly dusted with a mixture of chilli powder, oil and vinegar.

Everyone enjoyed a fresh green salad with tomatoes, carrots, beets, parsley, mint leaves, corn, and red lettuce in a pistachio sauce along with hot fresh brown bread with butter. The main course was braised salmon, a lightly flame seared potato and tomato, and green pepper. Thick Turkish coffee finished the meal. Grounds coated his throat.

Friendly strangers, including beautiful women with very deep dark seductive eyes flashing love's lost and found, escorted him to a crowded local cafe where they taught him the traditional game of backgammon while sharing fruit-flavored hubbly-bubbly tobacco pipes well past his bedtime, regaling him with fantastic stories about their lives and environmental survival strategies.

They had an Encounter.

Peace.

Salad days

Greetıngs,

The Turkısh keyboard takes a bit of gettıng used to because the small "i" is really a vertical line. Internet access is sporadic - no recent podcasts for the moment - as I dance around eating salad, cheese, fresh bread, salmon, olives and assorted Middle Eastern delights all washed down wıth sparkling mineral water (soda)...settling into the ebb and flow of the place, people, attitudes and all the variables.

"Where are all people?" I yelled at the top of my pitiful voice rasping fragments of sky standing along the street filled wıth emptiness. Well, for starters, there were business people knotted with ties, hiding behind shades, stern faced women dragging kids around for the summer in the heavy direct heat and flamıng red haired - nose pierced gothic counter intuitive punk rockers hanging out on corners, but, like you know, where are all the coagulating, broiling, endless MASSES...?

Peace. 

Anatolia

Once upon a time there was this traveler and he left China after three years. He’d taught English in Sichuan and Fujian. He loved writing, travel and teaching.

It was Time to leave because he’d completed all the work there he was supposed to do. He was ready to move on. He needed to make love along life’s road and give birth to new inspirations. Simple, immediate and direct.

Before leaving the Middle Kingdom he had a “going away - give it all away” party. He gifted 30 books and 40 DVDs to his English major students at a university in Fujian.

“Don Quixote, The Garden of Secrets, If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, The Poetics of Space, Journey to The Center of the Night, Nomad, The Stream of Life, The Book of Imaginary Beings,” among others listed on his Amazon book list. He knew the students would enjoy and share world literature.

He gifted 20 plants to Chinese teachers whose destiny was established long ago. Plants he had nurtured through wind, rain, sun and lightning flashes along eastern green mountains before, during and after sunrise.

After putting 2,650 miles on a Warrior bike he sold it to a tall business teacher from Holland where the land is flat and filled with windmills and tulips. The teacher would return to China after a summer holiday and needed it for his Chinese girlfriend. Spin them wheels.

Then, the traveller went to Xiamen and got on a plane to Hong Kong. He wandered around the huge gleaming airport looking at stuff and absorbing new dialects.

In a dream about flying to Istanbul he looked out a narrow plastic window and saw a brilliant severed slice of orange and red sun inside blue and white clouds on a horizon.

He closed his eyes and dreamed he landed in Ankara where he would live, teach and explore.

A woman named G met him at the airport. Blond, positive, 40’s and from Australia. While they zoomed into the hilly capital on a brilliant sunny Mediterranean day past red tiled roofed stacked apartments and brown block styled buildings from 1930 he regained his sense of perspective in a new land as she regaled him with information. He heard it all and forgot most of it because he was tired from all the dreaming.

She took him to a fine 5th floor apartment where he met a young part-time female teacher, an artist from Capetown, South Africa, named A, who'd return home in August with her husband, a film maker.

The flat had a fine balcony displaying the sky, clouds, western hills, amazing sunsets and bird shadowed wings. Blue jays, sparrows, pigeons, starlings.

The space received red, white and pink roses and delicious plants to give it color and life.

Peace.

Future's face

Greetings,

She trimmed the end of old wood with her blade.
She is pounding
Metal on metal

She centered
the ironed steel metal hoe edge,
placed an awl into the wood -
splintering it
down
wedging it
striking it
with labor's hard
farm life determination

she hammered the hoe blade down,
caressing wood - a home, a shelter, grains
feeling steel inside fractured forgiving trees,
adjusting - pounding -
eyeing the edge, her work
done.

Across the street students shovel in the food.

Peace.

One bowl

Greetings,

He gave him a wooden bowl.
“This is the traditional way. Put your choices in the bowl. We can discuss the price later.”

He accepted the wooden bowl and, to be polite, because he was a guest in their country, wandered around a showroom looking at inlaid boxes, handled daggers with fake stones, silver rings, bracelets, bangles, beads, earrings and silver necklaces in provocative gleaming displays.

In another reality he carried his begging bowl through dirt streets in the world. It felt cool and smooth in his hands as his fingers caressed a worn oval surface. The begging bowl had a consciousness.

He reflected the horror in his mirror. He re-calibrated true bearings and measured his way inside third world countries thumbing open his useful ragged egalitarian existential foreign dictionary.

It was filled with myths, symbols, images, ideographs, pictographs, virus inoculations, sliding scales, musical interludes, sonatas and vibratos. It held journey notes, sardonic Irish flies, bleeding tomatoes, broken hearts, fried home truck stops, haiku, khata scarves, pure mirror paper, type-A negative blood donor manifests, rose thorns, the game of life and empty wooden bowls.

Tiznit boys wanted him to fill it up. They wanted him to be greedy. They wanted to hear the sound of silver strike wood. They had great expectations of wealth based on his desire. He wanted to hit the bricks. He found one interesting bracelet and it clattered, spinning silver.

He became a Tuareg Berber.
“I’ll give you 100. Take it or leave it,” he said in Tamashek. The boy was shocked to hear his language, his dialect. He had no idea. They were on common territory.

Peace.